Sarah Palin's email exchanges while Alaska governor to be released

Former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin tried to delay the email release saying it would be expensive and too time-consuming. Photograph: Ed Andrieski/AP

Tens of thousands of emails to and from Sarah Palin during her time as Alaska governor are to be released within the next week after more than two years of obstruction and delay.

Requests for the emails, under the Freedom of Information Act, would normally take about a fortnight. But Palin, when she was governor, and her successor and fellow Republican Sean Parnell sought repeatedly to delay the release, initially saying it was too expensive, that the sheer volume would make for a time-consuming exercise and, finally, on legal grounds.

Palin's tenure as governor from December 2006 until resigning in July 2009 was controversial, permitting drilling for oil and gas in a protected area, claiming for her family's travel expenses, a row over the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, and firing the public safety commissioner, who claimed he had resisted pressure to fire her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.

The question is how much detail will be in the emails and whether they will be damaging to Palin. Although 24,199 emails sent between Palin and her aides are to be released, 2,415 are being held back by the state law department on legal grounds. Some of the emails to be released will include redactions.

The Freedom of Information requests were made by US media organisations after Palin achieved national fame in 2008 when the Republican presidential candidate John McCain made her his running mate.

The release comes when Palin has re-emerged after a few months of maintaining a relatively low profile, attracting media attention for a campaign bus tour of the east coast. Palin has not yet said whether she will seek the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama for the White House next year.

But the tour feeds speculation that she will stand. She is visiting New Hampshire and Iowa, and, according to the website Real Clear Politics, South Carolina, the three states where early Republican nomination contests will be held.

Adding to the speculation, the premiere of a documentary about her time as governor, Undefeated, is to be held next month in Iowa.

The film was made by Stephen Bannon, a former banker, and he apparently financed it himself, at a cost of $1m (£600,000). Palin told Fox News, for which she is a paid contributor, on Tuesday that the documentary would provide an opportunity to tell her side of her time as governor and correct many of the "misconceptions".

She said Bannon had bought the rights to the audio version of her book Going Rogue and used excerpts in the film and that she had added interviews to fill in gaps. News organisations that requested the emails, including the Associated Press, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and several private citizens were informed on Tuesday of their imminent release.

The Anchorage Daily News reported that state officials expected to send the emails to a commercial printer to be copied this week, a process that was estimated to take about four days. These would then be shipped to the news organisations.

MSNBC said earlier this year that once it received the emails it would eventually put them up as a searchable archive by the public, in co-operation with other news organisations.

When the request for emails was initially made, the cost to each news organisation was initially put at $15m (£9.2m), by Palin's office, possibly to dissuade them. As it turns out, the cost is only $725.97 in copying fees, plus shipping costs.

State lawyers went through the emails proposing ones to be withheld or redacted. The final decision rested with Parnell, an ally of Palin's.

Andree McLeod, a longtime Palin critic who was one of those to request the emails, told the Anchorage Daily News she was pessimistic about the chances of learning any damaging details.

"I don't hold much hope that all of these emails haven't been scrubbed of any incriminating information," she said.

The Alaska attorney general, John Burns, had set a deadline of 31 May for the release to hurry along the governor's office.